Rabbi Nancy Fuchs Kreimer, Ph.D.

Rabbi Nancy Fuchs Kreimer, Ph.D., has been involved with interfaith dialogue for nearly four decades. She attended some of the earliest initiatives to include Muslims. She launched RRC’s department dedicated to multifaith studies in the late 1980s and has pioneered innovative service-learning courses, internships and unique opportunities for RRC students to study sacred texts with their Christian and Muslim counterparts. Her efforts led to a groundbreaking 2009 summer retreat for Jewish and Muslim scholars and to an ongoing salon series for students and faculty called “Praying With Your Feet: Conversations With Social Activists About Faith.”

Kreimer is on the advisory board of the new Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue and serves as a founding board member of Clergy Beyond Borders with Imam Yahya Hendi. She has attended many of the world’s landmark interreligious gatherings, including, by invitation of the emir, the first international conference of Muslims and Christians in Doha, Qatar, to include Jewish leaders. She also spent a week at the Washington National Cathedral as one of three national figures chosen to discuss how their respective religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) address social justice for the disenfranchised. She has been a guest lecturer and scholar in residence across the United States and in Germany.

Kreimer includes the study of the relationship between science and religion as part of multifaith studies. She has taught courses on this topic at RRC and has presented at many international gatherings of the Metanexus Institute for Science and Religion, whose board she has been a member of since 2003.

Previously, Kreimer served as director of the Kaplan Institute for Adult Jewish Studies and as rabbinic director of the Jewish Identity Program of the Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Philadelphia. She is a past president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association; she also was a member of the RRA Ethics and Executive Committees and a board member of the Association for Religion and Intellectual Life.

Kreimer earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Wesleyan University, a Master of Arts from the Yale Divinity School, rabbinic ordination from RRC and a doctorate in religion from Temple University.

She blogs at www.multifaithworld.org and at The Huffington Post.and is the author of Parenting as a Spiritual Journey (second printing: Jewish Lights, 1998) and of articles in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Religious Education, Cross Currents, Lilith and The Reconstructionist and Jewish Social Studies, among other journals. She contributed chapters to Broken Tablets: Restoring the Ten Commandments (Jewish Lights Publishing, 1999), Christianity in Jewish Terms (Westview Press, 2000),The Torah: A Women’s Commentary (Women of Reform Judaism, 2007) and other volumes in the fields of interreligious dialogue, religion and social science, and Jewish thought.